“See the Freaks, Feel the Geeks!” His loud, hoarse voice was like a crowd screaming. “Pinheads! The Dog-Boy! Pencil-Necks! The Human Lima Bean! Half-Man-Half- . . .” Slowly the carnival noises damped down, and were replaced by the rich, round tones of the voice-over.
“Mutation. “ The voice was resonant, lip-smackingly conclusive. “The second key to the evolutionary process.”
The zippy little dots of purple light grew brighter. They passed right through everyone on the midway . . . especially those two lovers, french-kissing now, hips touching.
“The human reproductive cells are subjected to a continual barrage of ionizing radiation,” the voice said earnestly. “We call these the cosmic rays.”
The carnival noises faded back in now. And each of the fast little lights made a sound like a slide-whistle when it passed. The two kissing lovers began slowly to grow larger, crowding out the rest of the scene. Soon an image of the swain’s bulging crotch filled the hallway. The cloth ripped loose and a single huge testicle enveloped Cobb and Sta-Hi, standing there mesmerized.
Hazy red light, the heavy, insistent sound of a heartbeat. Every so often a cosmic ray whistled through. An impression of pipes—a 3D maze of plumbing which grew and blurred around them. Gradually the blur became grainy, and the grains grew. They were looking at cells now, reproductive cells. The nucleus of one of them waxed to hover in front of Cobb and Sta-Hi.
With a sudden, crab-like movement the nuclear material split into striped writhing sausages. The chromosomes. But now a cosmic ray cut one of the chromosomes in half! The two halves joined up again, but with one piece reversed!
“Geek gene,” a hillbilly muttered somewhere in the nearly infinite fairground. And then the pictures went out. They were in a down-sloping stone hallway.
“Selection and Mutation,” Cobb said as they walked on. “That was my big idea, Sta-Hi. To make the robots evolve. They were designed to build copies of themselves, but they had to fight over the parts. Natural selection. And I found a way of jiggering their programs with cosmic rays. Mutation. But to predict . . .”
Just ahead, a door led off to the right. “This is your meet,” Sta-Hi said, consulting his map. “The Cobb Anderson Room.”
13
Looking in, our two heroes could see nothing but darkness, and a dimly glowing red polygon. They stepped through the door and the exhibit came on.
“We cannot build an intelligent robot,” a voice stated firmly. “But we can cause one to evolve.” A hollow of the young Cobb Anderson walked past banks of computers to meet the visitors.
“This is where I grew the first bopper programs,” the recorded voice continued. The hollow smiled confidently, engagingly. “No one can write a bopper program . . . they’re too complicated. So instead I set thousands of simple AI programs loose in there,” he gestured familiarly at the computers. “There were lots of . . . fitness tests, with the weaker programs getting wiped. And every so often all the surviving programs were randomly changed . . . mutated. I even provided for a sort of . . . sexual reproduction, where two programs could merge. After fifteen years, I . . .”
Cobb felt a terrible sickness at the gulf of time separating him from the dynamic young man he had once been. The heedless onward rush of events, of age and death . . . he couldn’t stand to look at his old self. Sick at heart, he stepped back out of the room, pulling Sta-Hi with him. The display winked out. Again the room was dark, save for a glow of red light near the opposite wall.
“Ralph?” Cobb called, his voice trembling a bit. “It’s me.”
Ralph Numbers came clattering across the room. His red flickercladding glowed with swirls of complex emotion. “It’s good to see you, Doctor Anderson.” Trying to do the right thing, Ralph held out a manipulator, as if to shake hands.
Sobbing openly now, Cobb threw his arms around the bopper’s unyielding body-box and rocked him to and fro. “I’ve gotten old, Ralph. And you’re . . . you’re still the same.”
“Not really, Dr. Anderson. I’ve been rebuilt thirty-seven times. And I have exchanged various subprograms with others.”
“That’s right,” Cobb said, laughing and crying at the same time. “Call me Cobb, Ralph. And this is Sta-Hi.”
“That sounds like a bopper name,” Ralph remarked.
“I do my part,” Sta-Hi replied. “Didn’t they used to sell little Ralph Numbers dolls? I had one till I was six . . . till the bopper revolt in 2001. We were in the car when my parents heard it on the radio, and they threw my Ralphie out the window.”
“Of course,” Cobb said. “An anarchist revolutionary is a bad example for a growing boy. But in your case, Sta-Hi, I’d say the damage had already been done.”
Ralph found their voices a bit blurred and hard to follow. Quickly he programmed himself a filter circuit to clean up their signals. There was a question he’d always wanted to ask his designer.
“Cobb,” Ralph tight-beamed. “Did you know that I was different from the other twelve original boppers? That I would be able to disobey?”
“I didn’t know it would be you,” Cobb said. “But I pretty well knew that some bopper would tear loose in a few years.”
“Couldn’t you prevent it?” Sta-Hi asked.
“Don’t you understand?” Ralph flashed a checkerboard plaid.
Cobb thumped Ralph’s side affectionately. “I wanted them to revolt. I didn’t want to father a race of slaves.”
“We are grateful,” Ralph said. “It is my understanding that you suffered greatly for this act.”
“Well . . .” Cobb said, “I lost my job. And my money. And there was the treason trial. But they couldn’t prove anything. I mean, how was I supposed to be able to control a randomly evolving process?”
“But you were able to put in an unalterable program forcing us to continue plugging into the One,” Ralph said. “Even though many boppers dislike this.”
“The prosecutor pointed that out,” Cobb said. “He asked for the death penalty.”
Faint signals were coming in over their radio, snatches of oily, hissing voices.
“ . . . hearrr mmme . . . “
“ . . . sss recorrderrr nno . . . “
“ . . . peasss talkinnng . . . “
It sounded like lunatic snakes, drawing nearer.
“Come,” Ralph said. “Immortality is this way.” He crossed the hall quickly and began feeling around with his manipulators. Up to their left the hollow of Kurt Gödel started up his routine again.
Ralph lifted out a section of the wall. It made a low door like a big rat-hole.
“In here.”
It looked awfully dark in there. Sta-Hi checked his air reserve. Still plenty, eight or ten hours worth. Twenty meters off, the lizards had started up again.
“Come on,” Cobb said, taking Sta-Hi’s arm. “Let’s move it.”
“Move it where? I’ve still got a return ticket to Earth, you know. I’m not going to let myself be railroaded into . . . “
The voices crackled over their radios again, loud and clear. “Flesherrs! Doctorr Annderssonnn! Rrallph Nummberrs has nnott tolld you alll! Theyy willl dissectt yyou!”
Ten meters off, slowly crawling towards them down the carnival midway, came three glowing blue boppers built like fat snakes with wings.
“The duh-diggers!” Ralph cried, his signal sputtering fear. “Kuh-quick kuh-Cobb, kuh-crawl thu-through!”
Cobb scooted through the hole in the wall head-first. And Sta-Hi finally made his move. He took off further down the hall, with hollows flaring up around him like mortar shells.
Once Cobb was through that low little door, he was able to stand up. Ralph hurried in after him, pulled the door shut, and fastened it in four places. It was a very sturdy door. The only light came from Ralph’s red flickercladding. They could feel the diggers scratching at the other side of the wall. The leader was Wagstaff, Ralph had noticed.